Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters

by Peter Vronsky

  Dean and Belva Kent were among those who never noticed the man. They were sitting with their daughter, seventeen-year-old Debra Kent. During the intermission, Debra left the auditorium to pick up her brother from a nearby skating rink. She used the school pay phone to call him and say she was on her way and walked out of the school toward her parents’ car. She then vanished. The car was found parked as it was when they first arrived at the school. Debra’s body was never found.

  Thirteen murders in ten months, and there were more to come. While the police in Utah hunkered down for what they expected to be more murders in December, nothing happened. Ted was back in Seattle for the Christmas holiday.

  In Seattle, after the discovery of the first bodies, the investigation had mobilized into a major effort. The police had a list of 3,000 names that had been phoned in—including Ted Bundy’s four times by now. The 3,000 names were fed into a computer. The names of Volkswagen owners in Washington State were added, the names of all the friends of victims, names from their address books, class lists of all the missing girls’ fellow students, all mental patients in the state for the last ten years, known sex offenders, names of motel guests near Lake Sammamish, and even names of people renting horses to ride in the district. The computer was then programmed to print out any names that appeared twice. Nearly six hundred names emerged. The computer was asked to print out any names that appeared four times—and the computer responded with four hundred names, including Ted Bundy’s. This time, the computer was asked to print out five coincidental appearances of the same name. The computer identified twenty-five names for the police to investigate. Bundy was not one of them.

  The sameness of Bundy’s crimes becomes numbing to describe. Clever kidnappings, no witnesses, no physical evidence. The victim was rendered unconscious by a powerful blow to the head with a blunt weapon, raped and sodomized, and then strangled.

  After the Christmas holidays, Bundy returned to Utah. The next disappearance happened over in the next state—Colorado. Caryn Campbell and her boyfriend were staying at a ski lodge. In the evening they were in the lobby sitting by the fireplace when Caryn went upstairs to get a magazine from her room. She never made it. Her magazine was found untouched. A month later her body was discovered a few miles from the lodge, partially consumed by animals. Her skull had been fractured and it appeared as if she had been strangled.

  In March, back in Washington State, forestry students working on the slopes of Taylor Mountain found a skull. It was identified as Brenda Ball, the girl who had gone missing at the Flame Tavern some thirty miles away. Two hundred police officers began making a painstaking search along the slopes of Taylor Mountain. Their search would yield scattered fragments from the heads of three other victims: Susan Rancourt, who disappeared on her way to a movie at her campus, ninety miles away; Kathy Parks, who disappeared while going for a coffee at her campus, 260 miles away; and Lynda Healy, the first girl who had vanished from her basement apartment. Four girls, killed at four different locations at four different times, their heads dumped on Taylor Mountain—the killer’s private graveyard. He spent months returning to the same location, arriving each time with a new head. Even for seasoned police officers, it was a horrific find.

  At the time a junior investigator, Robert D. Keppel, suggested that the killer was cutting off the victims’ heads and keeping them for a while before dumping them on Taylor Mountain. The notion was dismissed at the time by the supervisors because no neck vertebrae were found at the scene. Typically, intentional decapitations are made with a cut below the base of the skull, leaving a fragment of the vertebrae at the scene. Senior police officials instead insisted that animals had dragged the other bones away beyond the search perimeter, never adequately explaining why animals left precisely only fragments of the heads.

  Keppel later recalled:

  My own theory—considered outrageous—was that, for a period of time, the killer had parked the skulls at another location, where they decayed individually, and then dumped his entire load just inside the edge of the forest. The physical evidence, which consisted of leaves in skulls from one previous leaf fall, the growth of the maple branches through and around the skulls, and the lack of any tissue on the crania left me with the feeling that they were exposed to outdoor elements, in one place, where they decayed at the same rate. In other words, they were put someplace else for a period of time and then brought to Taylor Mountain; the killer was moving around the body parts of his victims. It seemed as though nobody wanted to consider my theory seriously—maybe because it gave too much credit to the ability of the killer to manipulate evidence and escape detection. They also probably didn’t want to consider what it would take to catch a killer so remorseless that he could handle the body parts of his dead victims long after he had murdered them.94

  Years later Bundy would confess to Keppel that he used a hacksaw to sever the victim’s heads and that he kept them in his apartment. The bodies he dumped at other undisclosed locations, which he would visit from time to time to see how the animals had devoured them. Ted also admitted that he burned Donna Manson’s head in the fireplace of Liz Kendall’s home.

  On March 15, in Vail, Colorado, twenty-six-year-old Julie Cunningham went out at about 9:00 P.M. to meet a friend at a nearby bar for a drink. She never arrived and her body was never found.

  On April 6, in Grand Junction, Colorado, twenty-five-year-old Denise Oliverson set out on her bicycle from her apartment to her parents’ house. Her body was never found.

  On April 15, eighteen-year-old Melanie Cooley vanished in Denver.

  In May, three friends from last summer’s work at the Washington Department of Emergency Services—Carole Ann Boone, Alice Thissen, and Joe McLean—came to spend a week with Bundy. They went swimming and horseback riding and remember that Bundy seemed to be in high spirits. In the evenings Bundy prepared gourmet meals for his guests while Mozart played on his stereo.

  In prison, referring to himself in the third person, Bundy explained that his desire to kill was akin to a hobby—it was not something you did all the time, “like collecting stamps. He doesn’t retain the taste of glue, so to speak, all day long.”

  In June, Bundy was back in Seattle. He spent a lot of time with Liz Kendall discussing marriage plans and helped his former landlords, Ernst and Frieda Rogers, put in a garden at the rooming house. Near the end of the month he left Seattle.

  On July 1, Shelley Robertson, twenty-four, vanished in Golden, Colorado, after being last seen at a service station; much later that same day, about seven hours away, in Farmington, Utah, near Salt Lake City, twenty-one-year-old Nancy Baird vanished, also from a service station. Ted Bundy was on his way back to Salt Lake City.

  On Saturday, August 16, 1975, at 2:30 A.M., a Utah Highway Patrol officer was sitting in his cruiser in front of his own house in the Salt Lake City suburb of Granger when he saw a Volkswagen drive by. It was a small neighborhood where there was little traffic, and even less at night, and almost every vehicle was known—this auto was not. The officer let the car pass without taking any action. Ten minutes later, the car passed by again and this time the policeman turned on his high beams to read the license plate. As soon as he did that, the Volkswagen turned off its lights and began to drive away quickly. After a short pursuit, the highway patrolman had the Volkswagen pull over into a service station parking lot. Ted Bundy stepped out of the car.

  Bundy was relaxed and calm, but appeared confused as to why he was stopped by the police. He told the officer he had been at a movie and got lost on his way home. When the patrolman asked the name of the movie playing at the theater, Bundy made his fatal mistake—he gave the wrong title. A few minutes later, another patrol car arrived, summoned by radio. Bundy’s trunk was searched. Inside they found a pair of handcuffs, a mask made from pantyhose, an ice pick, short lengths of rope, and torn strips of sheets.

  Bundy was taken into custody, charged with evading police, fingerprinted, and sent home. He was told to expect a
warrant charging him with possession of burglary tools.

  On the following Tuesday, police officers from various Utah agencies gathered for their weekly review of arrests. It was a boring procedure as the various arrests of that week were reviewed and notes compared. But when Salt Lake City detectives heard the mention of a Volkswagen and a pair of handcuffs, they immediately became alert.

  Slowly, step by step, Ted Bundy was first charged with possession of burglary tools, and then, after being identified by Carol DaRonch, he was charged with attempted kidnapping. Bundy remained free on bail during his trial in the winter of 1976, but once he was convicted in the spring, he found himself in prison. Because Bundy had no previous criminal record, his sentence was fairly light—one to fifteen years, meaning that he could be paroled after serving only three years. But soon after Bundy began serving his sentence in Utah, he was charged with murder in Colorado. He found himself transferred to Aspen, Colorado, to stand trial for the murder of Caryn Campbell, who had disappeared at the ski lodge. By now the police had assembled a formidable collection of evidence consisting of gas receipts, phone bills, credit card slips, hair samples, and witnesses who linked Bundy’s movements and presence with the murder of Caryn Campbell. Bundy was now in serious trouble.

  Ted Bundy’s story should have ended there; perhaps if it had, Bundy might have remained in history as just another serial murderer with seventeen kills. Instead of becoming a household name and a movie of the week, Bundy could have become another Gerald Stano—a guy who killed forty-one women between 1969 and 1980, twice as many as Bundy, but nobody has heard of him other than true-crime buffs. But Bundy made a spectacular escape by jumping from a second floor window of the Aspen courthouse during a lunch break, which guaranteed him superstar status in the future. He disappeared into the mountains for nearly a week before he was recaptured after getting lost and coming back down into Aspen. At the time, the full extent of Bundy’s crimes was not known, and Bundy was treated as a local hero and outlaw.

  Remarkably, after escaping once, Bundy escaped a second time. On this occasion he managed to saw his way through the steel ceiling of his jailhouse cell on the night of December 30, 1977. This time, instead of heading into the mountains, Bundy went directly to the airport. By the time the authorities realized that Bundy had escaped, he was already in Chicago. From there, he slowly made his way to the college town of Ann Arbor, but did not like it there, and moved to Tallahassee, Florida. He took a room in a student house near Florida State University and survived by shoplifting and stealing credit cards.

  Within sixteen days of his escape, in the middle of the night of January 15, 1978, Bundy slipped into a campus sorority house carrying a log and walked from room to room battering the heads of sleeping women. He bit the nipple off one woman and sodomized her with an aerosol bottle of hair spray before killing her. In total, two women were killed and two were severely injured. A few minutes later at another house nearby, he battered a fifth woman, but failed to kill her.

  Bundy’s crimes had become frenzied. The attack on five women in one night was unlike Bundy’s previous carefully executed crimes. His attack was characteristic of a disorganized personality: The weapon was a piece of branch taken from a woodpile at the back of the sorority house. The bite marks left on one of the victims were a valuable piece of evidence that would be effortlessly matched with Bundy’s teeth. The women were found at the crime scene, unlike Bundy’s other victims.

  Bundy was reaching the “burnout” stage. This is the stage in which some serial killers quietly surrender to the police; others commit suicide; some go underground, never to be heard from again; others, like Bundy, increase the frenzy of their killing and become sloppy, as if hoping that the police will capture them.

  On February 9, Bundy kidnapped and killed a girl who is believed to be his last victim—twelve-year-old Kimberly Leach. She was snatched in front of her school. Her body was found in April in an abandoned hog shed—she had been raped and sodomized and then strangled. By then Bundy was already in custody. He was pulled over on February 12 while driving a stolen car in a drunken state. Earlier that day he had been caught four times committing petty crimes but managed to talk his way out of trouble every time. While in custody, he was identified. Ted Bundy would never leave Florida again.

  Bundy was a thinking person, and no doubt after he had been arrested the first time and jailed, he must have thought a lot about his crimes. He considered himself lucky when he escaped to Florida, for in Colorado he was on trial for murder but had not yet been convicted. He knew that his compulsion was the ruin of his life. Bundy believed that the two years in jail had cured him of his homicidal desires; certainly in the first weeks he lived in Florida, he attempted to stay away from situations in which he might be tempted to kill. However, at some stage he must have suddenly felt the pangs of his compulsion once again, and by that point in his life he knew that he could not resist.

  Bundy must have been smart enough to know that sooner or later his compulsion would lead to his capture, and therefore he began to gorge himself on killing, no longer caring if he was leaving evidence behind or not.

  Bundy’s conclusions about his own crimes are intelligent but banal. Bundy attributed his crimes to “peculiar circumstances of society and of the twentieth century in America.”95

  He said, “Living in large centers of population and living with lots of people, you can get used to dealing with strangers. It’s the anonymity factor. And that has a twofold effect. First of all, if you’re among strangers you’re less likely to remember them or care what they’re doing or know what they should or should not be doing. If they should or shouldn’t be there. Secondly, you’re conditioned almost not to be afraid to deal with strangers.”96

  Bundy was charged with the sorority house murders and the murder of Kimberly Leach. The trials were held separately, were televised, and cost the State of Florida $9 million. Bundy acted as his own defense counsel.

  His friend Carole Boone, whom he had met the summer he worked at the Department of Emergency Services, became his lover.

  When Bundy was convicted for murder, he and Boone requested permission from Florida’s prison authority to get married. Permission was refused. Bundy then pulled off a coup by performing the marriage ceremony himself. Boone filled out the necessary marriage licenses at the courthouse. She was then called to the stand by Bundy to testify as a character witness during his sentencing hearing. During the examination, Bundy suddenly asked her if she would marry him and she replied, yes. Bundy then responded that he, too, wanted to marry her. A notary hired by Boone sat among the courtroom spectators and witnessed the exchange of vows. Under Florida law, Bundy and Boone were now legally married, and thus Boone had the right to ask for contact visits in prison with her husband Ted. Although such visits were restricted to a kiss, a hug, and holding hands under the watchful eyes of guards, prisoners often managed to engineer some way to have sex with their visitor. Boone claimed that she and Bundy conceived a child during one of these contact visits. If true, then Bundy had a daughter in the autumn of 1981.

  While on death row awaiting execution, he was asked if he felt guilty about the murders he had committed. Guilt, he said, is an illusionary mechanism to control people and is unhealthy and does terrible things to people’s bodies. Bundy replied that he felt as sorry for those who felt guilt as he did for drug addicts or businessmen who craved money. It solves nothing. It only hurts you, he said.

  Bundy had committed many of his murders in King County in Washington State. In 1982 a new serial killer took his place there—the Green River Killer. Robert D. Keppel was now a senior investigator when Bundy offered to profile the Green River Killer for him. Keppel accepted and secretly met with Bundy, not only to take advantage of Bundy’s expertise in serial murder but to also probe further into Bundy’s own crimes and possible locations where missing victims might be found. Keppel found Bundy’s insight into serial killers perceptive. At the same time he marveled a
t Bundy’s ego and his sense of superiority over the Green River Killer. Keppel said, “The Leonardo da Vinci of serial murder was Theodore Robert Bundy’s perception of himself.”

  Bundy himself proclaimed, “I’m the only Ph.D. in serial murder. Over the years I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about it. The subject fascinates me.”

  Bundy explained his crimes in the context of young urban professional ambition when he said, “Society wants to believe it can identify evil people, or bad or harmful people, but it’s not practical. There are no stereotypes. The thing is that some people are just psychologically less ready for failure than others.”

  After years of numerous appeals and motions, Bundy was executed in January 1989. Carole Boone and Ted’s daughter had vanished from the public eye several years earlier, and it is not known if they stayed in contact with Bundy. Ted may have died alone. On Florida campuses, students hosted “Bundy-Qs” and chanted, “Fry, Bundy, Fry” on the day he was electrocuted.

  The Disorganized Serial Killer: Miguel Rivera—“Charlie Chop-Off”

  An example of the disorganized class of serial killers, Miguel Rivera randomly attacked young boys in tenement buildings in East Harlem and on the Upper West Side of New York between March 1972 and August 1973. His first victim, an eight-year-old boy, was stabbed thirty-eight times and sodomized, and an attempt was made to cut off his penis. Three other boys were found in hallways, in basements, and on the rooftops of various tenements, stabbed to death and their genitals cut off. Local children dubbed the serial killer “Charlie Chop-Off.” Witness testimony produced a description of a Puerto Rican suspect who was attempting to persuade young boys to run errands for him. Following a failed attempt to kidnap a nine-year-old boy in May 1974, Miguel Rivera, who exhibited severe signs of mental illness, was arrested. Rivera claimed that God had told him to transform little boys into girls. The hidden logic and erratic behavior of the disorganized serial killer makes it difficult for police to narrow down a suspect, even though he often makes no attempt to cover up his crimes.